Personal Knowledge Management

I've always been looking for a tool that could simplify all notes I take to store and gather business knowledge I accumulate along my consulting activities.  This could even be leveraged  for other aspect of life for that matter, but for now my need is to optimize the knowledge acquisition and retention done when taking on new professional projects.

The level of cognitive load is directly linked to all the new information (principles, fact, rules, definition, etc.. ) that is  to be assimilated early on any new project inception.  Any method or tool helping me to optimize my knowledge acquisition and management could certainly be a big benefit for the project. 

The key spec I'm looking for in such a tool are:

1. must be flexible and easy to add new content without having to first organize and structure the content, the relationship among concept and taxonomy
2. must be light (must not "get in the way" ) and ideally available from the net and stored the info centrally
3. must easily allow for structuring, re-structuring the content (either through tag, hierarchy, taxonomy, etc...)
4. and obviously must be intuitive...

There are tools more oriented toward online collaboration which have been adapted for personal use: personal wiki ( e.g. twiki for personal, moinmoin personal).  But I find these too html-presentation oriented... my concern is to gather information not how should it be represented.

Although I did not yet find the optimal solution, I find the tools that falls into the area of  "mind-mapping" (e.g. theBrain, freeMind, thinkgraph) to offer good characteristics.   You are not too worried with how info is presented (since it pretty much follow a fix canvas) so you can fully dedicate yourself with the information content.  However, it does suffer from a few limitation:   volume content (I don't see collpasing/exploding thousands or more nodes), versioning and/or time-dependent information, ...

So until I find a better match, I will keep on relying on mind mapping software, and it always help when you can have a good open source and free version such as Freemind.   And for an online solution, there is also mind42.com.  

As an example, I just used it to gather some background knowledge on rules/best practices applicable when one wants to define data layer of aggregation in a typical data warehouse implementation relying solely on relational technology  (inspired from Mastering data warehouse aggregates).  Here is a partial view of this guideline (done with Freemind):

Here is the same guideline shown as a dynamic mind map :

Martin